Strong El Niño events cause large changes in Antarctic ice shelves

El Niño and La Niña are two distinct phases of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a naturally occurring phenomenon characterized by how water temperatures in the tropical Pacific periodically oscillate between warmer than average during El Niños and cooler during La Niñas.

The research, funded by NASA and the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, provides new insights into how Antarctic ice shelves respond to variability in global ocean and atmospheric conditions.

Study - Fernando - Paolo - PhD - Graduate

The study was led by Fernando Paolo while a PhD graduate student and postdoc at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. Paolo is now a postdoctoral scholar at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Paolo and his colleagues, including Scripps glaciologist Helen Fricker, discovered that a strong El Niño event causes ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica to gain mass at the surface and melt from below at the same time, losing up to five times more ice from basal melting than they gain from increased snowfall. The study used satellite observations of the height of the ice shelves from 1994 to 2017.

"We've described for the first time the effect of El Niño/Southern Oscillation on the West Antarctic ice shelves," Paolo said. "There have been some idealized studies using models, and even some indirect observations off the ice shelves, suggesting that El Niño might significantly affect some of these shelves, but we had no actual ice-shelf observations. Now we have presented a record of 23 years of satellite data on the West Antarctic ice shelves, confirming not only that ENSO affects them at a yearly basis, but also showing how."

Effects - El - Niño - Ice - Shelves

The opposing effects of El Niño on ice shelves -- adding mass from snowfall but taking it away through basal melt -- were at first difficult to untangle from the satellite data. "The satellites...